Programmable Mechanical Metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper introduces programmable mechanical metamaterials whose deformation responses can be tailored through lateral confinement, enabling diverse behaviors like hysteresis, by exploiting broken rotational symmetry and nonlinear deformation coupling.

Contribution

It presents a soft mechanism model and a design strategy for creating mechanically programmable metamaterials with tunable responses.

Findings

Demonstrated programmable responses to uniaxial compression

Achieved multi-stability and giant hysteresis through inhomogeneous confinement

Provided a general design framework for confined mechanical metamaterials

Abstract

We create mechanical metamaterials whose response to uniaxial compression can be programmed by lateral confinement, allowing monotonic, non-monotonic and hysteretic behavior. These functionalities arise from a broken rotational symmetry which causes highly nonlinear coupling of deformations along the two primary axes of these metamaterials. We introduce a soft mechanism model which captures the programmable mechanics, and outline a general design strategy for confined mechanical metamaterials. Finally, we show how inhomogeneous confinement can be explored to create multi stability and giant hysteresis.